Setting up a blog with Typo
Sometimes you just have to try something for yourself. Today, that was setting up my own blog on my own server.
Yesterday, I posted my first article about my experiences with Ruby at a seldom used LiveJournal of mine. I eventually decided that it made more sense to have this on my own server, running my own choice of software on my own choice of OS (FreeBSD).
A bit of googling led me to Typo. Typo is a blogging package written using the Ruby on Rails framework.
The package looked slick, has themes, and other nice features, so I figured I’d give it a try. That was the easy part. I’ve spent the better part of my evening upgrading bits and pieces of software as a result.
I started off with the easy bits: upgrading Ruby and rails. This really was the easy part. In FreeBSD, it was a matter of installing the Ruby port, followed by the rubygem-rails port. This port automatically installed all the necessary dependencies, including RubyGems. RubyGems is a package manager type of thing for Ruby. It works well. It reminds me of CPAN for Perl.
Afterwards, I learned I would need FastCGI for good performance with any Rails app. Naturally, I had to upgrade Apache —but couldn’t do it the easy way without cutting off web service for my users for an unacceptable period of time. So I had to build a temporary copy of Apache 2.2 to test the new configuration. After I was satisfied that the temporary copy worked, I switched it on. I then was able to purge the old packages and dependencies, build the new Apache 2.2 package, install, configure, and then test it. I was finally ready to switch off the temporary Apache install and enable the new Apache packages.
Now my system was ready for FastCGI. FastCGI is a nifty way of speeding up applications that are slow to start, but fast once started—like Ruby and Perl applications.
Because I wanted to put this blog at http://www.royhooper.ca/blog/, I had to follow alternate install instructions. Of course this didn’t go smoothly either. I had to futz around with my configuration, looking for the culprit. Eventually, with the help of trusty Google, I ran across two [1, 2] helpful web pages.
I’m fairly happy with the results. I’ll definitely have to play with this theme to make it look the way I want, but I like how it works.
